This book chapter in 'The Politics of Carbon Markets' contributes to the project of investigating the deeper politics of carbon markets by analyzing the processes that are connected with the building up of epistemic authority for defining the superior functionality of emissions trading as a policy instrument. We analyze the ‘pre-history’ of carbon trading with a view to the emergence of the emissions trading constituency, an agencement that enacted a powerful center of policy calculation, which strung together and orchestrated the production and circulation of the ‘cap and trade’ model in relation to its implementation in a number of ‘in vivo’ policy experiments. We show how these developments led to the emergence of carbon trading as an increasingly acceptable policy option in the 1990s.
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